Drifting ice could impact shipping lanes

Posted on 04 December 2012

The birth of an ice island is rarely seen. But what begins in remote high Arctic latitudes can, in the years and decades that follow, have a real impact on places that are far more visible, such as shipping lanes and offshore oil platforms.

Recent years have produced a wave of ice islands. Researchers tracking the giant formations have tabulated roughly 600 square kilometers that have broken free from Greenland and Canada’s Arctic islands, according to The (Ottawa) Globe and Mail.

At a time when new research suggests that the Greenland ice sheet is melting five times faster than it was in the 1990s — and roughly a quarter of that is in the form of icebergs, according to the Swiss Federal Research Institute — a frozen area the size of Hong Kong is wandering south, breaking into hundreds and thousands of smaller bits, some too small to be seen by ship radar, as they drift.

“If they break up into smaller pieces and you get bergy bits and growlers”— concrete-hard chunks the size of houses and cars, some of which can be submerged in heavy wave conditions, making them difficult to spot — “they’re impossible to track at that scale,” Derek Mueller, an assistant professor in the department of geography and environmental studies at Carleton University who studies icy regions, told the paper.